


A Grim Old Place

by Evandar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Bashing, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Divorce, Don't copy to another site, Ghost Sirius Black, M/M, Misogyny, Moving On, Not Tonks Friendly, Past Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks, Post-Divorce, mentions of adultery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-11-28 17:00:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20969963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: All Remus wants after his divorce is a project to keep busy and a quiet place to finish his fourth novel. What he gets is a mysterious house in the posh part of Kensington, which is being haunted by a ghost with a surprisingly decent sense of humour.





	A Grim Old Place

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt T17: “Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.” - bell hooks
> 
> Team: Journey

He buys the crumbling townhouse with the proceeds for his fourth book. It’s a five-story wreck in the posh part of Kensington, stuffed with dilapidated furniture and decaying floorboards. It smells of rot (but not, mercifully, of damp) and the first time he opens the door, he nearly chokes coughing on the dust. He falls in love in the moments it takes to catch his breath again – with the deep, oak floorboards buried under aged carpets and drifts of dust; with the high ceilings and elaborate coving; with the cobweb-draped chandeliers and the immediate hush that envelopes him when he closes the door behind him.

It’s honestly a miracle that it hasn’t been snapped up and transformed into bespoke apartments for super-wealthy businessmen to buy and leave empty, but Remus isn’t going to question it too much. He wants a fixer-upper for something to do between writing, and he needs London for his sanity’s sake. That this house, this utter dump of a building, was available on the market - _on budget_ \- is a miracle. It’s fate. 

It’s home already, even if he can’t actually live in it yet.

It takes months: a builder to make sure that the walls and ceilings don’t collapse, an electrician to rewire the place, and a plumber to make sure the pipes and the water supply are sound. A fucking _chimneysweep_ to clear decades of soot and dead pigeons out of the house’s network of fireplaces. It takes longer than it _should_ because something spooks them – the first plumber decides not to come back after his first day, leaving Remus with the godawful task of finding someone to take on an already started job, abandoned just because the building’s a bit draughty.

“Cold spots,” the electrician tells him. “Bloody creepy, mate, I wouldn’t want to sleep in there.”

But Remus does. Even if he’s reduced to sleeping on the massive flagstones in the kitchen, curled up on an airbed in front of the hearth. It’s cold and draughty, yes, but it’s better than the house he’s left behind. It’s a different kind of emptiness: this echoing shell of a building with its ancient, crumbling décor is warmer, somehow, than the family home he’d tried so hard to set up and failed.

He scrubs the kitchen from floor to ceiling and back again, polishes the huge wooden table that takes up the majority of floorspace, and he uses it to eat at one end and type at the other. After a week of trying (and failing) to produce anything edible on the antique, cast iron stove that came with the house, he bites the bullet and gets a new kitchen installed: one with an electric oven and a stove that doesn’t need to be kept on at all hours. It makes the kitchen feel colder, not having the range going all the time, but it’s more convenient. It stops him from living on takeaways. 

With the kitchen done, he starts making forays into the rest of the building. It’s structurally sound, at least, but there’s _so much_ to do that it’s overwhelming. He covers the heavy furniture and strips the walls of their embossed wallpaper, rolls up the rotting rugs and shoves them into the back of his Volvo to take them to the tip. (He is _not_ forking out for skip hire in central bloody London, absolutely not.) He becomes aware, gradually, of what the workmen had meant when they mentioned cold spots. Every so often, usually when he moves into a new room, he’ll notice the temperature dropping – sometimes so much that his breath becomes visible. He notices other things too: not being able to find objects in the places he left them, the prickling sensation of being watched. Sometimes at night, just on the edge of sleep, he hears the clicking of claws across the stone floor.

…

One of his many jobs is taking down the seemingly endless portraits from the walls. They’re a grim bunch of oil paintings – a family of pale aristocrats in dated clothing, dark-haired and grey-eyed and utterly miserable. He lifts their heavy, gilt frames down from every room and corridor. Their blank, pale stares have become increasingly unnerving over the last few weeks. As the sensation of being watched continues, he’s starting to become a little paranoid. 

It’s nothing, he knows that; nothing but loneliness and too much coffee in an old and quiet house.

There’s one portrait he can’t take down. One of the previous owners had the rather abysmal taste to hang an enormous painting at the bottom of the stairs – a pinch-faced old crone in Victorian clothing glowers out of it, and every time Remus walks past it, he thinks he can hear her. It’s a high, nagging voice that grates at him; criticises everything from his hair to the bags under his eyes to the patches on the elbows of his favourite jacket. He’s entirely sure that it’s _not_ her – paintings don’t talk – but the voice in his head is so very pervasive that when he finds he physically _can’t_ lift her frame down, he throws an old curtain over the monstrosity instead.

He thinks about sending James a text and asking for help, but he deletes the message before he can send it. He hasn’t spoken to any of his old friends since the divorce: too ashamed and too aware that they’re all still happily married when he isn’t; too aware that his friends became Dora’s friends too, and that it’s her that they’re bound to side with.

He goes to bed quietly angry with himself. The portrait weighs on his mind as much as the failure of his marriage. He lies in the dark, unable to sleep, staring up into the shadows of the ceiling with his mind in a whirl.

He’s beginning to drift off again when he hears it. A dog’s claws tapping through the kitchen and down the hallway. It’s clearer tonight than it has been before and so real that he pushes himself up on his elbow to look for the cause of it. The kitchen is empty, of course, and the door to the hallway is firmly shut to try and keep the draught to a minimum. 

He lies back down, frowning. He rolls onto his side and closes his eyes, listening to the familiar creaks and groans that are less out of place in an old building. Slowly, slowly, his mind and body begin to grow heavy. He starts to drift.

He leaps out of bed at the sudden crash from down the hall, stubbing his toe on the leg of the table as he darts over to the light switch. He flips it and opens the door, sending yellow light beaming down the length of the hall.

Nothing. 

He steps out, raises a hand to flip the hallway light on. The chandeliers at the far end illuminate a heap of curtain, wood and canvas no longer in the shape of a painting, but rather a rumpled pile of rubbish. He steps closer, unbelieving. 

The painting hadn’t been hanging by a string. It had been so large that it had been bolted to the wall with four-inch screws. It had been so heavy and unwieldy that Remus would probably have broken his back trying to lift it himself – if he’d even been able to reach both sides of the frame at a time to give it a go.

Now, it’s so much kindling. 

He lifts the curtain. The crone’s accusing face stares up at him with fierce grey eyes, her painted head severed from the rest of her body by a shard of her own frame. Remus shudders. The painting’s destruction is hardly a crime against art, but there’s something…almost vicious about its demise. Something that seems almost deliberate.

He jumps, dropping the curtain, at the sound of laughter. A wild bark of noise right behind him, and a cool gust of air on the back of his neck.

The hall is still empty.

He spends the rest of the night in his car.

…

_I’m pregnant_ the text says. _I don’t know if it’s yours._

Nothing else. No more details. Two rings before she sends him straight to voicemail.

He throws himself into gutting what was probably once the drawing room. He sifts through cabinets of curios and finds a nest of mice in the back of a chaise. The remaining morbid fuckers on the walls stare down at him as he takes one look at the _hand of fucking glory_ that they had tucked away in the corner of a cabinet and shoves it in the trash bag.

Some things, he’s been selling off to antiques dealers or pawning. So far, the ‘Noble and Most Ancient House of Black’ have been quite generous in their leavings – mice and creepy portraits and _human body parts_ aside; he’s made a tidy little profit from the things they left behind.

And they left behind _everything_.

There are drawers still filled with their underthings; moth-eaten suits still hand in wardrobes. A pair of drop earrings set with rubies the size of his thumbnail have been gathering dust on the dresser in the master bedroom, untouched by time. The house hasn’t been broken into, hasn’t been disturbed until Remus bought it since – at his best guess – the mid-Victorian period.

There are things he’s found that belong in a museum – that he’s actually started putting aside so that he can _take_ to a museum. A gold locket, embellished with an emerald serpent and engraved with what looks like astrological symbols, goes carefully into that pile.

He casts a wary eye at the bin bag. Is it a crime to take preserved pieces of another human being to a public dump? Or should that be taken to the museum as well? He’s debating it when he sees movement. 

He freezes. 

He hasn’t seen or felt or heard anything unusual since the night the crone’s portrait fell off the wall – almost as if the house is apologising for scaring him. Now, however, he can _see_ something: a shadow where there shouldn’t be one. From the corner of his eye he watches a dark figure, blurred at the edges, cross from the window to one of the better-preserved seats where it sits and promptly fades from view. Remus swallows. He can still feel it, the prickling of the hair on the back of his neck as it watches him.

“Hello?” he says, his voice squeaking only a little. “I, ah, hope I’m not disturbing you, but, ah. Thank you. For helping with the painting.”

He _hopes_ that it’s the same entity that stood behind him and laughed in the hallway. He’s not sure what he’d do if he found there was more than two – given that he’s definitely heard a dog prowling around. He also hopes very fervently that this is not the ghost of the person whose severed hand he just tossed in the bin.

“Bloody hell, there’s a ghost,” he mutters. “Of course there’s a ghost. And I’m talking to it. Fucking _Christ_.”

His comment sparks a familiar bark of laughter, and he finds himself grinning down at the bin bag – the one that still has a fucking _hand_ in it - and watching from the corner of his eye as a shadowy figure flickers back into view, tossing its head back in humour.

He texts James that night. _Dora told me she’s pregnant. Don’t know if it’s mine. She’s not giving any details._ A second text. _Tell her I’ll support her if she needs it. She might listen if she hears it from you._

Invisible claws click across the floor. He hears the dog flop down next to him, hears its pants and the soft, flopping sound of it licking its lips. He reaches out in the dark, keeping his eyes averted, and for a split second before his hand hits the floor, he thinks his fingers brush fur.

…

There’s a tapestry on the wall of the drawing room. He hadn’t noticed it earlier – too preoccupied with the grisly exhibitions in the wall cabinets. Once he’s brushed a little of the dust off, he finds names and dates. _Phineas Nigellus Black, Cassiopeia Black, Castor, Pollux, Arcturus, Orion, Walburga, Bellatrix, Regulus, Sirius_ \- the names of stars woven between twisting branches. He runs gentle fingers along the intricately woven threads, following the family tree, noting marriages and deaths and, on occasion, incest. He grimaces. 

The only name without a death date is Walburga Black, nee Black. She’s predeceased by her husband Orion and youngest son, Regulus, both in 1849, and her eldest son, the third Sirius on the tree, in 1851. 

He has a hunch he knows who the hag in the portrait was, given that her image was dressed in a widow’s weeds.

She, however, is not his ghost. That name remains a mystery – though Remus supposes he must have been a Black to be stuck in this mausoleum for eternity. He gets into the habit, as the weeks turn into months and the renovations progress, of greeting his ghost every morning with a “good morning” or “hello” to try and provoke a response. Most of the time, he’s successful, receiving flickering lights and moving teacups. It’s terribly sad, but Remus thinks it’s almost like having a friend again.

James texted back, all those months ago. Dora never did. Remus has let contact die between them since, more focused on his book and his decorating, and on the short stories that seem to be flowing from his fingers these days. Ghost stories, all of them.

He fixes an old curtain over the top of the tapestry before climbing the ladder, roller in hand, to paint the high ceiling. His spine prickles under a familiar, invisible gaze, and he smiles. 

“Please don’t surprise me,” he says. “Not now.”

A huff of ghostly laughter is his only response before the prickling fades.

Remus sighs – half in relief and half disappointed. He _likes_ the ghost; he seems to have something of a sense of humour, at least. But without the distraction, the painting goes quickly, and by the time he descends the ladder with a crick in his neck he’s more than ready to put his feet up with a cup of tea. What he finds instead is writing in white paint, painted as if with a finger, on the curtain he’d placed over the tapestry.

_Dog Star_.

“Sirius,” he whispers. 

…

He sends his manuscript to his editor and floats the idea of an anthology in his cover letter. He feels like he should at least do _something_ with the stories that are building up on his hard drive. He goes to the British Museum with his box of antiques – including the hand of glory, rescued from the tip after a brief Google search told him it _would_ be a crime to shove it in landfill. He goes to the British Library to do some research on the Blacks, and stumbles across articles lamenting their loss.

_Tragedy in the House of Lords: Lord Orion Black, Twelfth Duke of Aldgrimm Dies Suddenly_

_Regulus Black, Esq. Missing, Presumed Dead, Following Accident at Melton Cove Beach_

_Missing Black Heir Found Dead! Family in Mourning_

_Lord Sirius Black, Thirteenth Duke of Aldgrimm, Found Dead at Family Estate. Foul Play Suspected!_

_The Tragic End of Noble Family: Lady Walburga Black Found Dead at Family Estate_

A bloody _Duke_! Though, that does explain the ruby earrings, and the other jewellery – equally ornate and valuable – that he’s found. A tragedy too: Sirius Black had only been twenty-one when he died – was murdered? – and his brother a mere nineteen.

He thinks of Dora, of the child that might be his, and he grimaces. She’s made it clear with her silence that she wants nothing from him, and in fairness, she’s probably right to expect nothing. But still, to lose a child in the prime of their life like that…it would be awful.

He finds a picture amongst the papers. A photograph of a young man with a familiar face: long black hair and pale eyes stare out at him, and there’s a faint twist to his lips that’s halfway between a sneer and a smile. He was beautiful, Sirius Black. Remus runs his finger along a cheekbone sharp enough to cut, and he prints the picture out.

He thinks he remembers where he put Sirius’ portrait. He’ll have to put it up again.

He does. He hangs it in the drawing room, next to his favourite chair. It’s on a complete whim that he takes a copy of his own photo – the one he uses on the dust-flaps of his books – and hangs it up next to it.

…

He’s been dreading, ever since he’d first taken his tour around the house and realised just how many personal effects were left behind, doing the bedrooms. He has no desire - _none_ \- to go riffling through anyone’s underwear drawer, whether they’ve been dead for a hundred and fifty years or not. 

He admits as much to Sirius as he makes his way up the stairs, finding comfort in the footsteps following his own. He debates out loud which room he should stay in once he moves out of the kitchen. 

A door swings open on his right. He looks at it. Looks down at the shadow that lingers in the doorway; the transparent hand that rests on the doorknob. 

“That one?” he asks. 

As far as he remembers, there’s nothing overly offensive in it, so he enters without complaint. The bed is large and sturdy-framed, hung with bold red curtains that remind Remus a little of school – and contrast hugely with the décor in the rest of the house, which tends towards green and dark. The room is packed with heavy furniture, but it’s nothing terrible. Nothing that, at a glance, is about to fall apart due to woodworm or dry rot.

There is, however, a mobile made out of dead bats hanging from the foot of the bed, and that is _absolutely_ weirder than even the hand of glory.

“Your family had a bit of a thing for corpses, didn’t it?” he says before he can stop himself.

Sirius laughs as the temperature plummets, and Remus shivers in the sudden cold as a soft voice whispers “yes” directly into his ear. He doesn’t jump, or shriek – he’s rather used to sudden changes in temperature now – but he does shoot Sirius a glare for the frankly unnecessary cold.

Only…he really is glaring at Sirius. Not at a shadow figure. Not at some invisible entity. Sirius. A short, slender man with perfect aristocratic features – the exact same face whose portrait he restored. He’s leaning up on tiptoes, black hair drifting loose from its tail at the base of his neck; his pale grey eyes are gleaming with humour.

He’s dressed in a waistcoat. It’s such an odd thing to notice, but he is. He’s in a waistcoat and a starched shirt, and his cravat is pinned in place with a tiny silver dog. He’s the epitome of a Victorian gentleman, except he’s staring at Remus in something like shock.

Shock that mirrors his own exactly, Remus expects.

“I can see you,” he says. “Why can I see you?”

Sirius smiles at him. He waggles his fingers in a playful gesture. “Magic,” he says – which is about as sane an answer as Remus _should_ have expected from a ghost who had once owned a hand of glory and a mobile made out of bats.

“Obviously,” he says, rolling his eyes. 

Sirius cackles.

…

Nothing tops the bats for strangeness, although he learns the sheer mortification of finding a dead man’s porn collection – specifically, the dead man who had been looking over his shoulder at the time. The sepia photographs of men in stockings, buttocks bared, had been enough to make Sirius vanish with – presumably – embarrassment. Certainly, Remus had felt jealous, at the time, of Sirius’ ability to just disappear into thin air at will.

He hadn’t thrown them out. He’d put them in a folder instead, and tucked it away in the library, announcing to Sirius exactly what he was doing with every step.

Shouting “I’m putting your pornography next to Byron’s _Complete Works_; seems appropriate enough, doesn’t it?” at a ghost is enough to make him glad that he _doesn’t_ have visitors and therefore doesn’t have to explain himself to anyone.

The photographs stay with him, though; his oh-so-helpful brain replacing their nameless subjects with Sirius. Sirius in stockings. Sirius leaning forward, holding a wooden switch against his pert rear for the delectation of some photographer. Sirius gasping quietly as the photographer – Remus, now, in his dreams – steps up behind him, bends him further over, fucks him hard and fast from behind and then photographs him again: still gaping and dripping with come.

Remus wakes to soiled sheets more than once.

When Sirius does reappear, the sudden lack of invisibility remains. Remus starts seeing him a lot more clearly: his colouring becomes less muted, his features less transparent. He starts seeing the dog too: a huge black dog that looks like some kind of cross between an Irish wolfhound and a Scottish deerhound. It’s rangy and long-limbed with shaggy fur and pale eyes, and it curls up next to him at night with its head next to his own.

“Did you have a dog?” he asks Sirius one day.

Sirius, who had been studying the family crest his brother had painted over his bed – still better than the bats, but more proof that his whole family had been _weird_ \- looks up at him with wide, guilty eyes. “No,” he says. “I’m the dog.”

That…brings a whole new aspect to things. Especially given the nature of Sirius’ porn collection, and the nature of Remus’ recent dreams.

“Oh,” he says.

…

He settles, once the house is done, into an easy routine. His anthology is done in record time. His fourth novel becomes a bestseller, and the fifth follows suit. He gives readings and does signings in bookshops and it’s a little overwhelming – especially given that the only person he really speaks to now is dead.

Sirius doesn’t sleep next to him as a dog anymore, but as an almost physical human. They laugh together, share stories and hearth fires. It’s the healthiest relationship that Remus has ever had and it’s _tragic_.

He’s asked permission, and a faithful retelling of the fall of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black is going to be headed to his editor within the year – complete with the sort of gory gossip that _hadn’t_ been included in the mournful newspaper clippings Remus had found.

The Black family was mad, the lot of them. Utterly, bafflingly, horrendously mental. All of them. Sirius and his bats included.

He’s on his way out of his latest signing, having shrugged on his coat and thanked the staff for their hospitality, when he bumps into Dora.

He…almost doesn’t recognise her. He’d _married her_, years ago, but the time they’ve spent apart – that he’s spent regretting and resigning and, ultimately, moving beyond – has blurred her into someone almost unrecognisable.

Her hair had been violet when he’d last seen her. It’s her natural brown, now, tucked into a ponytail with wisps escaping loose around her heart-shaped face. There are creases at the corners of her eyes, signs of laughter, and she has a toddler clinging to her. A toddler with Remus’ amber eyes and a smattering of freckles across his nose.

Remus swallows. The baby definitely wasn’t that Shacklebolt bloke’s, then.

“Remus,” she says, and he tears his gaze away from the child who is – who could have been – his. “You – you look well.”

He doesn’t recognise her, after all. Not even a little bit. The Dora he’d married had hated awkward small-talk, had insisted on skipping over it, no matter how uncomfortable that made everyone else around her. The person that’s in front of him now might as well be someone he’s never met.

“I am,” he says, thinking of Sirius waiting for him. “I’m happy.”

“Oh. Good. I mean, I hoped so. I wasn’t sure after – after you didn’t answer any messages from anyone,” she says. Her hand runs back and forth through the toddler’s hair, ruffling dark curls. 

He shrugs. “The only person I wanted to talk to never picked up the phone,” he says. “And I didn’t think James would appreciate me using him as a messenger pigeon. Besides,” he trails off. Smiles awkwardly. Their marriage had never been easy, not like it is with Sirius. He’d felt…pressured, once she’d told everyone they knew that she loved him. Even once he’d married her, he’d felt uncomfortable with that love; felt as if he hadn't earned it, coming as it did from someone as vibrant as her, so much younger than himself. There had been an expectation that he would, after a time, come to love her back the way she deserved. He'd failed.

He doesn’t blame her for looking elsewhere once he proved a disappointment. Not now that he knows how simple love _can_ be.

“Besides?” she prompts.

It’s going to sound cruel, what he wants to say. _“Besides, you got the friends, the house, and the baby in the divorce. All I wanted was privacy.”_ He can't. He shrugs again. "I moved on," he says.

She winces slightly and, still feeling like an absolute bastard, he turns away. “It was nice seeing you, Dora,” he says. “I hope you’re happy too.”

He walks home, through the rain and gathering fog. Sirius fusses when he arrives – coming from a time when getting a chill could mean death, he still doesn’t quite understand that a little rain is hardly going to do Remus in. He watches over Remus as he soaks in the bath, defrosting his fingers and toes, and he listens as Remus tells him about Dora’s appearance.

“Do you miss her?” he asks.

Remus thinks about it. “No,” he decides. “I haven’t for a long time.” He brushes his fingers through Sirius’, feeling goose-bumps erupt along his arm at the freezing cold touch. “I moved on,” he says.

…

His sixth novel is a truly salacious romp through the various scandals of Victorian society. He slaps that truly hideous Black family motto - _Toujours Pur_ \- on it as a title for the sheer irony. There’s nothing pure about the incest and the blackmail and the adultery and the murder that the Blacks were dealing in. Pure evil, in some cases – Sirius’ mother sounds like she was a right witch – but nothing as purely sanctimonious as they were no doubt claiming.

The seventh is a love story. A Victorian gentleman and a lonely scholar, separated by a hundred years. The day he posts it to his editor is a cold one. The previous night’s snowfall has been compacted into ice and he slips while crossing the road. He doesn’t manage to catch himself before his head hits the curb.

He blacks out.

When he comes around, he’s in his bedroom. His skull _throbs_. He squints against the light coming in through the window and he turns his face away from it, his gaze catching immediately on Sirius. Sirius, who is watching him with such a sad expression that Remus can’t help but reach out to comfort him. 

He knows it’s pointless, that they can’t touch. He _knows_. But.

But his fingers entwine with Sirius’ for the first time. They’re as long and bony as they look, and far less cold than any of their previous attempts at touch have proved. Sirius leans over him, brushes hair away from his aching temple, and touches a soft kiss to the corner of Remus’ mouth.

“I’m so sorry, love,” he whispers.

Remus raises his hand to touch – finally! – the long tail of black hair that’s tumbled over Sirius’ shoulder. It’s soft and silky and he touches it to his lips, pressing a kiss to the curls. 

“I’m not,” he replies.


End file.
